Senate Committee Kills Road Construction Bill

Initiative Would Use Borrowed Money

RICHMOND — A Senate committee has killed a measure that would have sent as much as $104 million in borrowed money to Hampton Roads for road construction.

The Senate Finance Committee tabled the measure last week in part, lawmakers said, because of a sense that there have been too many proposals to borrow money this year.

Earlier in the month, the Senate also killed two bond packages proposed by Del. Alan A. Diamonstein, D-Newport News, that would have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to arts institutions and public colleges for capital improvements.

Gov. Jim Gilmore opposed the borrowing initiatives, too, claiming that to borrow more than $1 billion in a year with a surplus nearly that big would send the wrong message to Virginians.

The highway measure was first proposed by Del. William P. Robinson Jr., D-Norfolk, to match similar borrowing initiatives to benefit North-ern Virginia and the Route 58 corridor in Southwest Virginia.

"There's e-nough money to go around, or we ought to leave it all alone," Robinson said when he added the Hampton Roads component to the bill.

Robinson developed no details on how to spend the money, other than to divvy it up proportionally among seven Hampton Roads localities and then let them spend it on their own highway priorities. The localities are Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg and James City County.

The Senate has approved the Northern Virginia and Route 58 borrowing initiatives, leaving it up to Gilmore to veto or sign off on them.

- Amy Gardner can be reached at (804) 644-7123 or by e-mail at richmonddp@aol.com